and how long have you felt this way?
Elisabeth Higgins O’Connor
March 8 to April 12, 2025
Artist’s reception: Sat. March 8, 3-5 pm
muffled, 2025, clay, glaze, twine
27” h x 17” w x 14” d
For artist and educator, Elisabeth Higgins O'Connor, this new body of work is a convergence—a return to ceramic sculpture after years of building and working with lumber, fabric, and cardboard. Fragmented figures, crowned with allegorical animal heads, their limbs wrapped in fired slip-saturated fabric are crumbling away, emerging from a long gestation. "A synthesis of past and present, these pieces reconnect me to the urgency of play, the gesture of making, and the delight of reinvention. Scaling down is an act of sustainability, a kindling of love for the studio, and a means of exploring ceramic processes long set aside."
Her work exists on a spectrum between the unnoticed and the overwhelming, the tender and the grotesque. Discarded domestic textiles, blankets, and thrifted Afghans—woven with memories of comfort, childhood, and mourning—are saturated in clay slip, bound, stiffened, and transformed. They cloak and reveal; simultaneously shrouded and struggling to emerge; badly bandaged, mummy-like.
Between elegy and absurdity, these ragged, battered animal-like figures bear both physical and internal histories. They embody tension: heartbreak and joy, chaos and intention, loss and accumulation. Gesture and materiality—what is carefully rendered, what is deliberately blunted—speak as much as form itself.
"I do not make work about animals but explore what they signify poetically for me—wild and domestic, tamed and feral. Mules embody stubborn resilience and the tension of hybridity. Coyotes navigate the threshold between rural and urban, masters of adaptation and quiet infiltration. Bulls evoke the Minotaur—powerful yet lost, trapped in the labyrinth of the present moment. Through allegory and fable, these figures serve as entry points, inviting the familiar while gesturing toward the unspoken." Elisabeth Higgins O'Connor
Detail muffled, 2025, clay, glaze, twine
27” h x 17” w x 14” d
struggleshroud, 2025, clay and glaze
36” h x 20” w x 13”d
one need not be a chamber to be haunted, 2024, clay and glaze
29” h x 18” w x 18” d
floodstate #2, 2025, clay and glaze
14” h x 14” w x 1.5” d
Elisabeth Higgins O’Connor received her B.F.A. in Ceramics from California State University, Long Beach, in 1995 and her M.F.A. in Art Studio from the University of California, Davis, in 2005. She has presented solo exhibitions and installations at venues including Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles; David Salow Gallery, Los Angeles; the Institute of Contemporary Craft, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Suyama Space, Seattle, Washington; the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery; Weber State University, Utah; Lancaster Museum of Art, California; and Verge Center for the Arts, Sacramento, California. Her work has been exhibited extensively across California, the U.S., and Canada, with notable group exhibitions at Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles; the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; Superflat x Juxtapozin Seattle, Washington; the Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia; and the John Elder Gallery, CUE Art Foundation, and Foley Gallery in New York City. Elisabeth’s work has been featured or reviewed in Juxtapoz Magazine, ArtForum, BeautifulDecay, Artillery Magazine,L.A. Weekly, Artweek, Square Cylinder, Los Angeles Times, KQED’s Art School, The Stranger, THE Magazine, and The Huffington Post. Her grants, fellowships, and awards include a 2005 Joan Mitchell Foundation M.F.A. Fellowship and a 2012 Artist-in-Residence Fellowship from the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska. She has twice participated in the Kohler Company’s Arts/Industry residency in Kohler, Wisconsin, and served as an artist-in-residence and visiting faculty member at the University of Washington, Seattle, in 2014. Elisabeth is a full-time studio artist and has taught studio art courses at the University of Washington, Seattle, and California State University, Long Beach. She is currently a Continuing Lecturer in ceramic sculpture and drawing at UC Davis.